Anti-Bot Challenge Blocks Legal Database Access
Summary
BAILII deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work anti-bot challenge, to protect its legal database servers against mass scraping by AI companies. The system uses Hashcash-style computational challenges that add minimal load for individual users but become costly at scale for automated scrapers. The challenge requires modern JavaScript and conflicts with privacy plugins like JShelter.
What changed
BAILII introduced Anubis, a proof-of-work-based anti-bot challenge, as a technical measure to protect its servers from aggressive AI web scraping. The system applies computational requirements similar to Hashcash that create negligible friction for legitimate users but significantly increase the resource cost of mass automated access. The measure serves as an interim solution while more sophisticated fingerprinting techniques for detecting headless browsers are developed.
Legal researchers and practitioners accessing BAILII European Court of Justice decisions should note that the site now requires JavaScript execution and may be blocked by privacy-enhancing browser extensions. Affected users should whitelist BAILII domains in JShelter or similar plugins to restore access to case law materials.
What to do next
- Disable JavaScript-blocking plugins such as JShelter to access BAILII legal databases
Archived snapshot
Apr 16, 2026GovPing captured this document from the original source. If the source has since changed or been removed, this is the text as it existed at that time.
Making sure you're not a bot!
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You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
Anubis is a compromise. Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam. The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable, but at mass scraper levels it adds up and makes scraping much more expensive.
Ultimately, this is a placeholder solution so that more time can be spent on fingerprinting and identifying headless browsers (EG: via how they do font rendering) so that the challenge proof of work page doesn't need to be presented to users that are much more likely to be legitimate.
Please note that Anubis requires the use of modern JavaScript features that plugins like JShelter will disable. Please disable JShelter or other such plugins for this domain.
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